It is a challenging time to be a journalism student.

Those entering the news industry face a profession struggling to recover public trust and attention, pay its journalists fairly, ensure they have a semblance of job security, and protect them from increasing — and intensifying — online abuse and harassment.

Journalists’ salaries have remained largely unchanged for the past decade, despite rising inflation. In the United States in 2023, there were 21,400 news and media layoffs, making it one of the worst years for job cuts since the 2008 financial crisis. Journalism in the United States and Canada remains overwhelmingly white and male, especially in positions of leadership and decision-making. Journalists increasingly report burnout and exhaustion in the face of low pay, understaffing, and general overwork.

For many, the solution is to exit the industry entirely. Other working journalists have begun to address these conditions by embracing labor organizing. Since 2015, journalists at about 170 newspapers, magazines, digital sites, nonprofits, podcasts, and public radio stations have unionized. Once unionized, journalists engage in collective bargaining for contracts that have raised wages, improved benefits, increased severance for layoffs, and implemented policies for increasing diversity and equity in newsrooms.

But this labor lens has been conspicuously absent from perhaps the most impactful setting when it comes to understanding and improving the news industry: journalism education. As professors training aspiring journalists and digital media workers, this gap is something we’ve noticed. In a scholarly article recently published by Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, we advocate for journalism educators to embrace the issue of labor as a vital aspect of preparing students for uncertain futures in the news industry.

We argue that journalism educators should focus some of their coursework on labor issues for two reasons. First, they must ensure students understand what they are in for when they begin their careers so that those students can make informed decisions about entering the news industry and, vitally, have the vocabulary and understanding to prevent them from blaming themselves when encountering difficult conditions. Second, a labor education will provide students with a fuller picture of the various actors and stakeholders in journalism beyond media companies. There are support structures, collective efforts, and resources available, which educators can share.

How an emphasis on labor would make journalism education more valuable

What could this “labor turn” in journalism education look like? And how can journalism educators address labor conditions without implicitly discouraging students from becoming journalists altogether? In our article, we argue that journalism educators should approach the topic of labor within their courses as honestly and comprehensively as possible. These discussions should not sugarcoat the challenges awaiting students who hope to become professional journalists; however, they also should also emphasize the opportunities available for navigating those challenges. In our article, we argue that a labor turn in journalism education should comprise a focus on three key concepts: solidarity, equity, and organizational support.

Solidarity, the principle of collective support and mutual trust, can counter the competitive individualism fostered in journalism by pointing students to the growing number of worker-owned media outlets that journalists have collectively launched, including Defector (which pays its 25 employees a base pay of $70,000), Hell Gate (which doubled its subscription revenue in two years), and 404 Media (which became profitable in only six months). A solidarity framework enables journalism educators to critically explore power dynamics in journalism — a perspective historically missing from journalism textbooks. Problems of labor precarity, low pay, and overwork are not individual problems that workers themselves must solve but are linked to ownership patterns in for-profit journalism and the problems the commodification of journalism poses for communities, readers, and workers alike. By studying recent and ongoing strikes in journalism, students would understand how these dynamics play out and how workers respond, and what labor conflict can teach us about the role of journalism in local communities.

Equity brings an intersectional lens to journalism education that centers students’ positions in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and citizenship. Traditionally, journalism education has not maintained a focus on race and gender issues within the profession. Yet there has been a reckoning in the industry over the past several years as workers of color have pushed their experiences with racism, marginalization, and exclusion into the spotlight. Foregrounding equity in journalism education enables educators to more comprehensively address the challenges aspiring journalists face, particularly those who identify as nonwhite and non-male, while also identifying supports and solutions being developed by journalists via a labor equity lens. For example, journalism educators are increasingly challenging the assumption that students should undertake unpaid internships and instead seek paid opportunities.

Organizational support is another vital concept for showing our students that they are not alone. To that end, we encourage journalism educators to invite members of labor unions to their classrooms to speak to students about working conditions and how journalists are collectively working to improve them. In Canada, the CWA-Canada media union runs an Associate Members Program, a free membership-based labor organization for students and emerging media workers and a useful resource for guest lectures. Other organizations we should welcome into our classrooms include National Association of Black Journalists and the Association of LGBTQ Journalists in the United States and Canadian Journalists of Color. Many of these organizations, such as Shared Bylines in Canada and the Canadian Association of Journalists, run mentorship programs that serve as a potential alternative to unpaid internships and strive specifically to support journalism students of color. We also encourage educators to invite early-career journalists to discuss their lived experiences in the workplace and how they navigate challenges.

Education as a form of inoculation

Journalism educators should consider labor issues in journalism education as a practical component of their training. They should impress upon students that the labor challenges they will likely face are far from theoretical. That means that, in addition to teaching students how to develop story ideas and write pitch letters, educators should help them understand how to negotiate freelance rates of pay, the importance of having a contract for assignments, and what collective supports exist. We should train students to become as adept at reading a collective bargaining agreement (typically available on union websites) or negotiating a freelance contract  as they are at writing a compelling lede. While some journalism educators address these topics in their classes, we encourage our colleagues to develop courses and workshops that  specifically focus on working conditions and labor rights.

A labor focus in journalism education, we argue, can inoculate students to better face uncertain futures. In labor organizing best practices, inoculation is a vital part of the organizing process when workers are preparing to form a union. It involves frank discussions of possible responses from management and risks that workers may face. The idea is that small doses of the expected reality can bolster immunity when faced with the real thing. In this regard, labor education is vital.

Several colleagues we informally surveyed while writing our article agreed that they can indeed prepare students to enter a precarious sector, but only if they are honest about the realities of working conditions. These educators discuss precarious employment, internships, and racism, sexism, and harassment and how to respond. They question the professional compulsion to work unpaid for “experience,” raising vital questions of equity and how unpaid work perpetuates class, gender, and racial inequalities. They invite guest speakers from unions or other organizations to show students how journalists come together.

Such interventions demonstrate a challenge to the framing of journalism as a “labor of love” or passion project that encourages individual self-sacrifice and normalization of precarious work, low pay, and poor conditions. Rather, such an approach encourages us to champion a notion of journalism as a public service whose practitioners deserve material security and safe working conditions.

In short, journalism education can no longer simply be about teaching students the tools of the trade. It must also become about teaching students the means of survival in an increasingly precarious profession.